Search This Blog

Xenon Alpha released!

An alpha version of the Xenon Desktop has been released. A description of the project follows.

Xenon is a portable web or browser based desktop for netbooks and thin clients, designed to be the easiest desktop ever.

The desktop includes a new GUI stepping away from traditional menus and is optimised for touchscreen and small devices.

The system integrates social networking features and standard desktop features into one software package.

Being browser-based, it is cross platform and cross architecture. It is built on HTML5 and PHP components, and can be run on extremely low-powered machines, allowing for cheap distribution and devices.

The backend can be run online (for users to access their data everywhere), on a personal LAN server, or on a small device, so the system can work offline, or if there are concerns about cloud storage.

An API is available, so anyone can start developing apps to distribute in Xenon's upcoming App Store.

The project's homepage is located at http://hackerlanes.com including the online desktop, ready for instant testing and a download of the alpha image for your server. The actual small footprint OS that will run on netbooks will come later.

We encourage contributions to the project, in the form of code (the languages currently used are (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL), art (eg icons, backgrounds, GUI concepts) or even just ideas.

To send any requests or contributions, or to join the project, please email the head developer at dan.dart@googlemail.com. Thank you!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I haven't made a blog in a long while, so I'd thought I'd share this, which I recently discovered how to do.

If you find the idea of proxies a bit restrictive. because after all, they have to be set up in the applications in question, and may not work for some applications, help is here. And all you need is an SSH server you can connect to. Sadly, this method requires root, but it's worth having for the system-wide Internet connection you'll get from it.

Authenticating as root
First, make sure you're root on the client machine (sudo -s or su -, depending on your distro), and that you can ssh as root to your target server. This is of course causes security implications, so it may be a good idea to generate a key pair for root-to-root access and block off passworded access for root, so that no one can bruteforce your root password.

Did you know that Android devices expose a modem on the USB interface, even when "Tethering" is turned off? It appears like this in dmesg:

[22338.529851] cdc_acm 1-3:1.1: ttyACM0: USB ACM device

You can connect to this as a raw serial console like: screen /dev/ttyACM0 or: minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0

This will accept GSM modem commands prefixed with AT, and give information about the phone, and presumably allow a dialup-like interface.
Many of the examples on M2MSupport.net will work with the phone, depending on which manufacturer and capability set, presumably. With my Samsung Galaxy XCover 4, I got the GSM capability set.
Try playing around with this, but don't get charged by your provider too much for making calls you never end! Make sure you hang up properly as per the protocol.
For more on standard modem commands, see the Hayes command set article on Wikipedia.
That's all for now!